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"When, Why, and How to Build a Developer Relations Team"
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"Defining a Career Path for Developer Relations"
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"What is Developer Relations" (Forbes.com)
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"So you're starting a new DevRel job..."
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Planning a Developer Relations Strategy - Matthew Revell of Hoopy
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The History of Developer Evangelism:
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How DevEx and DevRel can support Go-To-Market (video)
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DevRel the Ultimate Guide
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The Four Pillars of DevRel
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Planning your DevRel's Team Strategy
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R3's 2020 DevRel plan
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How to seed, grow, and scale DevRel
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A Developer Relations Bill of Rights: Every person who does the work of Developer Relations deserves to be supported by an environment which follows these 10 principles:
- A clear set of business goals: Every developer relations professional should know how their work contributes to helping their organization achieve its business goals.
- A well-defined place in the organization: Developer Relations staff deserve clear lines of reporting, with well-articulated lines of accountability.
- A structured way to impact product or platform: Developer Relations often has the clearest insights into specific needs from the community, and should have a defined way of sharing those insights with the product or platform team.
- Open lines of communication to marketing: Developer relations must be able to collaborate on messaging, communications and outreach efforts to ensure that marketing and Dev Rel initiatives are coordinated and coherent.
- The right tools specifically designed for the job: Developer Relations professionals deserve the same level of support and technical infrastructure that other disciplines rely on to execute, measure, automate and improve their work.
- Explicit ethical and social guidelines: Developer Relations can only succeed if it’s carried out with a mind to the social impacts that technology is having on society, and explicit guidelines help ensure that responsibility is fulfilled.
- Support for building inclusive communities: Developer Relations needs resources, support and education to carry out its critical role in making sure every type of developer gets to create technology by ensuring that coding communities are inclusive of creators from every background and of every identity.
- Clear distinction from sales engineering: Developer Relations needs to work closely with every other team in the organization, but its relationship to sales must be explicitly defined so that Dev Rel isn’t required to act as sales engineering.
- Ongoing resources for professional development: Developer Relations is a rapidly-evolving, constantly-changing field, which means that organizations must provide support and investment for professional development to keep team members up to date with advancements in Dev Rel.
- Connection to a community of peers: Developer Relations practitioners need access to peers for learning and sharing through events and online community.
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The Core Competencies of Developer Relations: "Developer Relations are the canonical source of truth, both for 3rd party developers looking for documentation, best practices, and training, and for internal engineering teams who need to understand the thoughts and experiences of 3rd party developers, and to get candid technical feedback on their developer offerings. ... Engineers don’t trust people who aren’t engineers, so Developer Relations needs to be made up of developers. Even then, they won’t trust just any engineer — we need to prove ourselves. ... Your developer relations team needs to create material that solves problems, as well as being inspiring, interesting, and entertaining. ... Developer Relations’ goal is to work with the largest developer audience possible, and creating a diverse Developer Relations team full of legit engineers makes it inclusive of a wider audience. ... Developer Relations can’t be cheerleaders, or sales people in disguise. They should make a horse aware of water, demonstrate how the water can help it, lead it to the water, and make the water as easy as possible to drink. ... A good developer relations team will push back against advocating a product if they don’t believe they can honestly promote it and advocate for it. ... In order to build trust with 3rd party developers, and represent them to internal engineering teams, Developer Relations needs to be a part of the ecosystem. ... Developer Relations is the voice with which you speak to your developer audience — it’s important that they speak often, and loudly. ... There are around 20 million developers in the world, spread across over 200 countries — so everything Developer Relations does needs to have a strategy to scale that doesn’t require a linear growth in team size."
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What does a developer evangelist/advocate do?:
- Outbound tasks:
- Be a social media presence
- Keep up to date with competition and market
- Create openly available software products
- Participate in other products
- Participate in public discussions
- Participate in other publications
- Create video tutorials
- Participate and help with events
- Act as a “firewall” for internal teams
- Help dealing with influencers
- Inbound tasks:
- Stay up to date and participate in products
- Keep product teams and internal engineering up to date
- Amplify messaging of internal teams
- Coach and promote internal talent
- Report on events and success of campaigns
- Help organising events
- Work with PR, legal and marketing
- Give constructive feedback to the product teams and get questions answered
- Collate outside feedback and convert to constructive feedback